Presented by Dr. James Oakes

The Friends of the Lincoln Collection of Indiana Announces the 2023 Rolland Lecture with James Oakes:

The great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison famously burned a copy of the US Constitution, denouncing it as a “compact with the devil” and an “agreement with hell.”  But another great abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, argued the opposite, that the Constitution was an abolitionist document and that it was a mistake for the opponents of slavery to hand the nation’s founding charter over to proslavery forces.  This lecture, “Duelling Constitutions,” will examine the way the national debate over slavery was also a debate over the meaning of the Constitution.

James Oakes is a professor history at the City University of New York. His most recent book is The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution, published by W. W. Norton in January 2021.

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